The Mysterious Marfa Lights

The Marfa lights are visible every clear night between the Marfa and Paisano Pass in Texas. At times they appear colored as they twinkle in the distance. They move about, split apart, melt together, disappear, and reappear. Residents have watched the lights for over a hundred years. The first historical record of them occurred in 1883 when a young cowhand saw flickering lights while he was driving cattle through Paisano Pass. He was told by other settlers that they often saw the lights, but when they investigated they found no ashes or other evidence of a campsite.

World War I observers feared that the lights were intended to guide an invasion. During World War II pilots training at a nearby airfield looked for the source of the elusive lights from the air, again with no success.

Over the years many explanations for the lights have been offered, ranging from an electrostatic discharge, swamp gas, or moonlight shining on veins of mica, to ghosts of conquistadors looking for gold.

The most plausible explanation is that the lights are an unusual phenomenon similar to a mirage, caused by an atmospheric condition produced by the interaction of cold and warm layers of air that bend light so that it is seen from a distance but not up close. In recent years the lights have become a tourist attraction.

The Texas State Highway Department has constructed a roadside parking area nine miles east of Marfa on U.S. Highway 90 for motorists to view the curious phenomenon.  The lights have made the little town of Marfa famous. To draw more tourists for the mysterious lights, the city has begun an annual festival to celebrate them.

Via: ACuriousHistory

What Happened to the USS Cyclops?

The 1918 Loss of the Navy Ship with 306 Aboard Still a Mystery

The U.S.S. Cyclops disappearance is the single largest loss of life on a ship not involved in combat. There were theories, but no answers. Her wreckage has never been found. The Cyclops was a Proteus class collier ship built for the US Navy before World War I. Before the war, she supported U.S. warships in European and Caribbean waters off the Atlantic seaboard as a member of the Naval Auxiliary Force. The Cyclops was commissioned into service in 1917, and continued carrying supplies to facilitate the U.S. Navy’s wartime operations. But this ship is best remembered for her disappearance.

The Cyclops’ Final Voyage
The ship left Rio de Janeiro on February 16, 1918, and arrived in Bahia on February 20. Before leaving port, Captain Worley had submitted a report that the starboard engine had a cracked cylinder and was inoperative. It was recommended that repairs be delayed until the ship returned to the United States.

Two days later, the ship departed for Baltimore, with no scheduled stops; however she made an unscheduled landing in Barbados on March 3, 1918. Captain Worley visited United States consul Brockholst Livingston and took on additional cargo. Officials in Barbados reported the water was over the Plimsoll line, indicating an overload.

The Cyclops left for Baltimore on March 4. The molasses tanker Amalco sighted her on March 9th near Virginia. The ship was never seen or heard from again. Reports indicate that on March 10, a violent storm swept through the Virginia Cape region, suggesting that the combination of the overloaded condition, engine trouble and bad weather may have ultimately caused the loss of this ship.

The Cyclops and Espionage Theory
About the time the search for the Cyclops was called off, a distressing telegram was received by the State Department from Livingston. It stated that Captain Worley was referred to as the “damned Dutchman” and apparently was disliked by other officers. There were rumors about men being confined and one was even said to have been executed. Livingston wrote that there were numerous Germanic names.

The Office of Naval Intelligence investigations revealed that Captain Worley was born Johan Frederick Wichmann in Germany in 1862, and he had arrived in America by jumping ship in San Francisco in 1878. By 1898, he had changed his name to Worley. During this time, he qualified for the position of ship’s master and had commanded several civilian merchant ships.

The investigators discovered Worley berated and swore at officers and men for minor offenses, sometimes becoming violent. There were allegations that he was pro-German and might have conspired with the enemy. His closest friends and associates were either German or Americans of German descent. One of the passengers on the final voyage was Alfred Louis Moreau Gottschalk, the consul-general in Rio de Janeiro, who was pro-German. This led to the theory that Worley handed the ship over to the Germans. After the war ended, German records were searched and this theory was debunked.

Cyclops and the Bermuda Triangle
The disappearance of the Cyclops is often credited to the Bermuda Triangle, which is an imaginary line from Miami, Florida to Bermuda to San Juan, Puerto Rico. It’s considered one of the earliest documented incidents involving the disappearance of a US ship. Many people cite the fact that the vessel disappeared without sending a distress signal as evidence it was lost in the Bermuda Triangle. Ship-board communication was in its infancy in 1918 and it wasn’t unusual for a fast-sinking vessel to have little or no time to make a distress call.

It’s alleged that, in 1968, a Navy diver reported the discovery of the wreckage of an old ship off of the Norfolk, Virginia coast in about three hundred feet of water. He said it looked like the bridge was on stilts. When he saw a picture of the Cyclops, he was convinced this was the ship wreckage he had seen on the sea bottom. The location would have been in the area where the violent storm of 1918, occurred. Further expeditions to the site failed to find the wreckage. The disappearance of the Cyclops remains an enigma of the ocean.

Via: Suite101

India’s Stone Age Megaliths Still a Mystery

Via: Ancient-Tides

How the massive tombs were built remains unknown.
Considerable mystery still surrounds an enormous and isolated megalithic site in southern India, called Hire Benakal, where scores of supposed tombs are constructed of upright slabs topped by capstones weighing 10 tons or more. Current conjecture is that the granite structures once contained graves, though no trace of human remains have been found there.
According to Archaeology.com:

The monuments were built over more than 1,000 years spanning the southern Indian Iron Age (1200-500 B.C.) and Early Historic (500 B.C.-A.D. 500) periods, and there are more than 1,000 of them across nearly 50 acres, from modest rock enclosures to mausoleum-like tombs.

Click here to see several photos of Hire Benakal and a brief description of it.